Elon Musk Posts 2B Fanart, Throws a Tantrum

Remember when the internet used to like Elon Musk?

Well, those days are long gone, it seems, as ol’ Musky’s most recent antics started with him posting NieR: Automata fanart, and ended with him pretending to delete his Twitter account in a fit of impotent rage.

Here’s the full, stupid story: a few days ago ol’ Musky posted a picture of 2B from NieR: Automata on his twitter account for all 27 million of his followers to enjoy. Sounds lovely. Problem is, it was fan-art, and for some reason he didn’t credit the creator of the piece. That along could have been dismissed as an unfortunate oversight: but when people asked him to credit the author, he gave a rather baffling answer: “No.”

He followed up – forgive the lack of direct quotes the Tweets have since been deleted – that “any fool can find out who the artist was in seconds” and “crediting artists is destroying the medium [of Twitter]”.

Anyway. As I said, he got a lot of backlash, deleted the tweets, and now posted that he “just deleted his account” on Twitter, which kind of undercuts the message. Although I don’t think anyone would mind terribly if he did at this point, this man just does not have the charm he used to have.

Well, he was right in one respect, Twitter did very easily find the original artist, a French artist and game designer named Meli Magali, who has been nothing short of classy about the whole affair. It’s also gotten her an enormous amount of support and attention, so in many ways Elon’s weird pouting actually did her a bigger favor than if he just cited her in the first place.

Still, it seems the stupid, rich, and powerful all love Twitter for some reason, so Musky won’t be gone for long. Soon he’ll be back to disappointing us with weird car tunnels like in the olden days.